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After breaking his leg photographing a racetrack accident, professional photographer L.B. "Jeff" Jefferies (James Stewart) is confined to his Greenwich Village apartment, using a wheelchair while he recuperates. His rear window looks out onto a small courtyard and several other apartments. During a summer heat wave, he passes the time by watching his neighbors, who keep their windows open to stay cool. The tenants he can see include a dancer he nicknames "Miss Torso", a lonely woman he nicknames "Miss Lonelyhearts", a composer-pianist, several married couples, a middle-aged sculptor, and Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), a traveling jewelry salesman with a bedridden wife.

One evening Jeff hears a woman scream "Don't!" and a glass break. Later he is awakened by thunder and sees Thorwald leaving his apartment. Thorwald makes repeated late-night trips carrying his sample case. Jeff notices that Thorwald's wife is gone and sees Thorwald cleaning a large knife and handsaw. Later, Thorwald ties a large trunk with heavy rope and has moving men haul it away. Jeff discusses these observations with his much-younger socialite girlfriend Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) and his insurance company home-care nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter), and becomes obsessed with his theory that Thorwald murdered his wife. He explains his theory to his friend Tom Doyle (Wendell Corey), a New York City Police detective, and asks him to find out whether anyone actually picks up the packing crate. Doyle looks into the situation but finds nothing suspicious, and discovers that "Mrs. Thorwald" picked up the packing crate. After Doyle leaves, Jeff asks Lisa if she thinks it was ethical for him to spy on his neighbor with binoculars and a telephoto lens; Lisa replies that she does not know much about "rear window ethics" but comments on their morbid curiosity by asking, "Whatever happened to that old saying, 'Love thy neighbor'?"

Soon after, a neighbor's dog is found dead, its neck broken. When the owner sees the lifeless body of her dog she screams to the courtyard: "You don't know the meaning of the word 'neighbors'. Neighbors like each other, speak to each other, care if anybody lives or dies! But none of you do!" and cries in grief. During the woman's hysterics, the neighbors all rush to their windows to see what has happened, except for Thorwald, whose cigar can be seen glowing as he sits in his dark apartment. Convinced that Thorwald is guilty after all, Jeff has Lisa slip an accusatory note under Thorwald's door so Jeff can watch his reaction when he reads it. Then, as a pretext to get Thorwald away from his apartment, Jeff telephones him and arranges a meeting at a bar. He thinks Thorwald may have buried something in the courtyard flower patch and then killed the dog to keep it from digging it up. When Thorwald leaves, Lisa and Stella dig up the flowers but find nothing.

Lisa then climbs the fire escape to Thorwald's apartment and squeezes in through an open window. When Thorwald returns and grabs Lisa, Jeff calls the police, who arrive in time to save her. With the police present, Jeff sees Lisa with her hands behind her back, wiggling her finger with Mrs. Thorwald's wedding ring on it. Thorwald also sees this, realizes that she is signaling to someone, and notices Jeff across the courtyard.

Jeff phones Doyle, now convinced that Thorwald is guilty of something, and Stella heads for the police station to post bail for Lisa, leaving Jeff alone. When the phone rings, Jeff assumes it's Doyle and quickly informs that the suspect had left the apartment. But as no one answers, he soon realizes that Thorwald himself had called him and was coming to his apartment. When he arrives, Jeff repeatedly sets off his camera flashbulbs, temporarily blinding Thorwald. Thorwald grabs Jeff and pushes him toward the open window as Jeff yells for help. Jeff falls to the ground just as some police officers enter the apartment and others run to catch him.

A few days later, the heat has lifted and Jeff rests peacefully in his wheelchair, now with casts on both legs. The lonely neighbor woman chats with the pianist in his apartment, the dancer's lover returns home from the army, the couple whose dog was killed have a new dog, and the newly married couple are bickering. Lisa reclines on the daybed in Jeff's apartment, appearing to read a book on foreign travel in order to please him. As soon as he is asleep, she puts the book down and happily opens a fashion magazine.

Hitchcock used costume designer Edith Head on all of his Paramount films.

Although veteran Hollywood composer Franz Waxman is credited with the score for the film, his contributions were limited to the opening and closing titles and the piano tune ("Lisa") played by one of the neighbors, a composer (Ross Bagdasarian), during the film. This was Waxman's final score for Hitchcock. The director used primarily "diegetic" sounds — sounds arising from the normal life of the characters — throughout the film.[4]

A "benefit world premiere" for the film, with United Nations officials and "prominent members of the social and entertainment worlds"[5] in attendance, was held on August 4, 1954 at the Rivoli Theatre in New York City, with proceeds going to the American-Korean Foundation (an aid organization founded soon after the end of the Korean War[6] and headed by President Eisenhower's brother).

The movie went on to earn an estimated $5.3 million at the North American box office in 1954.[7]

The film received overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics and is considered one of Hitchcock's finest films. On the website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has been universally praised, garnering a 100% certified fresh rating, based on 61 reviews, with the consensus stating that "Hitchcock exerted full potential of suspense in this masterpiece."

Critic Bosley Crowther of The New York Times attended the benefit premiere, and in his review called the film a "tense and exciting exercise"[5] and Hitchcock a director whose work has a "maximum of build-up to the punch, a maximum of carefully tricked deception and incidents to divert and amuse." Crowther also notes: "Mr. Hitchcock's film is not 'significant.' What it has to say about people and human nature is superficial and glib. But it does expose many facets of the loneliness of city life and it tacitly demonstrates the impulse of morbid curiosity. The purpose of it is sensation, and that it generally provides in the colorfulness of its detail and in the flood of menace toward the end."[5]

Time called it "just possibly the second most entertaining picture (after The 39 Steps) ever made by Alfred Hitchcock" and a film in which there is "never an instant ... when Director Hitchcock is not in minute and masterly control of his material."[8] The same review did note "occasional studied lapses of taste and, more important, the eerie sense a Hitchcock audience has of reacting in a manner so carefully foreseen as to seem practically foreordained."[8]Variety called the film "one of Alfred Hitchcock's better thrillers" which "combines technical and artistic skills in a manner that makes this an unusually good piece of murder mystery entertainment."[9]

Nearly 30 years after the film's initial release, Roger Ebert reviewed the Universal re-release in October 1983, after Hitchcock's estate was settled. He said the film "develops such a clean, uncluttered line from beginning to end that we're drawn through it (and into it) effortlessly. The experience is not so much like watching a movie, as like ... well, like spying on your neighbors. Hitchcock traps us right from the first ... And because Hitchcock makes us accomplices in Stewart's voyeurism, we're along for the ride. When an enraged man comes bursting through the door to kill Stewart, we can't detach ourselves, because we looked too, and so we share the guilt and in a way we deserve what's coming to him."[10]

As of April 2014[update], Rear Window is the 31st highest-rated movie on Internet Movie Database, with an IMDb rating of 8.6/10; it is one place above Hitchcock's 1960 film Psycho, which is also rated 8.6/10.[11]

In his book, Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window", John Belton addresses the underlying issues of voyeurism, patriarchy and feminism that are evident in the film. He quotes "Rear Window's story is "about" spectacle; it explores the fascination with looking and the attraction of that which is being looked at."[12] Generally, Belton's book asserts that there is more to Hitchcock's thriller than initially meets the eye. These issues that society faces today are all more than just present in the film, they are emphasized and strengthened.

In 1997, Rear Window was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". By this time, the film interested other directors with its theme of voyeurism, and other reworkings of the film soon followed, which included Brian DePalma's 1984 film Body Double and Phillip Noyce's 1993 film Sliver.

Rear Window was restored by the team of Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz for its 1999 limited theatrical re-release (utilizing Technicolor dye-transfer prints for the first time in this title's history) and the Collector's Edition DVD release in 2000.

Ownership of the copyright in Woolrich's original story was eventually litigated before the United States Supreme Court in Stewart v. Abend, 495 U.S. 207 (1990). The film was copyrighted in 1954 by Patron Inc. — a production company set up by Hitchcock and Stewart. As a result, Stewart and Hitchcock's estate became involved in the Supreme Court case, and Sheldon Abend became a producer of the 1998 remake of Rear Window.

Rear Window is one of several of Hitchcock's films originally released by Paramount Pictures, for which Hitchcock retained the copyright, and which was later acquired by Universal Studios in 1983 from Hitchcock's estate.

Disturbia (2007) is a modern day retelling, with the protagonist (Shia LaBeouf) under house arrest instead of laid up with a broken leg, and who believes that his neighbor is a serial killer rather than having committed a single murder. On September 5, 2008, the Sheldon Abend Trust sued Steven Spielberg, DreamWorks, Viacom, and Universal Studios, alleging that the producers of Disturbia violated the copyright to the original Woolrich story owned by Abend.[15][16] On September 21, 2010, the U.S. District Court in Abend v. Spielberg, 748 F.Supp.2d 200 (S.D.N.Y. 2010), ruled that Disturbia did not infringe the original Woolrich story.[17]

The Simpsons spoofed Rear Window in the episode Bart of Darkness which takes place during the summer. The Simpsons get a swimming pool and Bart later breaks his leg, forcing him to spend time in his bedroom with his leg in a cast. Like Jeff in Rear Window, Bart uses a telescope and watches the residents of Springfield from his bedroom window. He suspects Ned Flanders of murdering his wife Maude, only to discover that Ned killed Maude's plant by accident.[19]

That '70s Show spoofed Rear Window, along with other Hitchcock films, in season 3, episode 4's "Too Old to Trick or Treat, Too Young to Die" (originally aired October 31, 2000).[20]

The 1984 version of Heathcliff spoofed Rear Window by having its title character look down on what he thought was a dognapping. At the end of the short, Heathcliff ended up the same way as Jeff.

The Mathnet episode "View from the Rear Terrace" has Kate Monday in a similar situation to Jeffries after breaking her leg for undisclosed reasons, and she starts spying on her next-door neighbor, named Raymond Sticker who turned out to be a criminal bomber & bank-pranker, all in attempt to get his revenge on the bank president.[citation needed]

The 100th episode of Castle, S05 E19 "The Lives of Others" was a cheeky spoof featuring an injured Richard Castle who is confined to his apartment and becomes obsessed after witnessing what he believes is a murder. But it was actually a setup by his friends & family to celebrate his birthday.

A season 4 Mike & Molly episode titled "Poker in the Front, Looker in the back" drew on various themes from Rear Window.

An episode of the British sitcom The Detectives, also titled "Rear Window", spoofed the movie, with one of the protagonists wheelchair-bound after an accident and convinced a neighbour is guilty of murder.

A season 5 Leverage episode titled "The Broken Wing Job" finds Parker laid up with a broken leg, watching the patrons of the brew pub on the security cameras, when she finds that two of them are planning what appears to be a heist. She recruits one of the pub's waitresses to help her stop it.

Episode 11 of season 1 of Person of Interest entitled "Super" involved John in a wheelchair spying on his neighbors in an apartment complex through an SLR camera. The name which John had rented out the apartment also relates to the writer of the screenplay for Rear Window.

Rear Window was re-released to DVD on September 4th, 2012 by Universal Studios Home Entertainment as a Region 1 widescreen DVD with the items available in the 2001 release and to the Blu-ray format on May 6th, 2014 with slightly expanded extras.